Subject: RE: XML iCal draft changes

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 16:52:42 -0400

> > Structure Properties
> > - the following structure properties where change to
> >              reflect their iCal counterpart
> >              - ical     to vcalendar
> >              - event    to vevent
> >              - todo     to vtodo
> >              - journal  to vjournal
> >              - freebusy to vfreebusy
> >              - timezone to vtimezone
> >              - alarm    to valarm
> > 
> 
> Why? Shorter element type names are simplier to remember and use. It
> also makes the lines of xCal more likely to fit on a single line, rather
> than be broken across lines. I don't support the idea of making the
> names the same as in iCalendar just for "sameness" sake. 

In the short term, this could work; but, in the long term, it effectively 
means we have to maintain two separate namespaces.  Worse, any translation 
code has to maintain a mapping table, which will get out of date whenever 
something is added to iCalendar.

Consider this scenario: you have FooCal 3.5, which supports all the latest 
iCalendar features, but doesn't grok the XML encoding.  So you have a 
helper app that transforms application/xcal+xml  (*) into text/calendar. 
If the XML encoding is simply a uniform mapping, with identical names, and 
with uniform rules for how to represent parameters, then that helper app 
can be written once and forgotten, not updated every time something's 
added to iCalendar.

(*) I'm not too thrilled with the notion of calling it xCal, by the way. 
This is just supposed to be a different encoding for iCalendar; anything 
else will lead to interop problems (as we discussed back in 1999)--and, 
once you give something its own name, it becomes harder not to think of it 
as a first-order entity.  I would prefer for the MIME type to be 
"application/icalendar+xml", to emphasize that it really is 
iCalendar-in-XML, and the common name to be something like "iCalendar 
XML", maybe shortened to "iCXML" or some such.

John Stracke
Principal Engineer
Incentive Systems, Inc.
[email-masked]

---

From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 15:54:36 -0600

John Stracke wrote:
> > > ...

> something is added to iCalendar.

On the other hand, it might keep people from just throwing in junk
and calling it new-iCalendar tags :-)

> (*) I'm not too thrilled with the notion of calling it xCal, 
> ...

I agree, lets not make people think it is a separate standard.

-Doug